How Does Perimenopause Affect Your Estrogen Levels?

Menopause is a long — and, for many women, unwelcome — process. Technically speaking, menopause takes a full year to complete. But that doesn’t mean this transitionary period is only 12 months long. 

Thanks to perimenopause (also called premenopause), this process often takes years. 

In other words, the changes many women associate with menopause often start well before they go 12 months without a period. During perimenopause, hormone levels change, causing symptoms like hot flashes, vaginal dryness, and mood changes. 

At least, that’s the case if you let those hormone levels go unchecked. But with bioidentical hormone therapy, you can replace the hormones your body stops making during perimenopause and menopause. 

With this treatment option, which Robert Grafton, MD, and our team offer, you can mitigate many of the negative effects of this time of transition. Visit us at PSI Medical Group in Wixom, Michigan, if you’ve been experiencing unwelcome changes.

Perimenopause, estrogen, and symptoms of dropping levels

While the levels of a number of your hormones start to change during perimenopause, estrogen is the most notable. As your body gets ready for menopause, your estrogen levels start to yo-yo, fluctuating up and down. 

The closer you get to menopause, the less estrogen your ovaries create. Eventually, they make so little that you stop ovulating. This starts the 12-month period of menopause. 

This hormonal change often starts a decade before menopause. Many women enter perimenopause in their mid-40s. Irregular periods are often the first sign of perimenopause that they notice. 

As estrogen production declines and your body moves toward menopause, you might experience symptoms like:

• Hot flashes and night sweats
• Vaginal dryness
• Headaches
• Lower libido
• More urinary urgency
• Sleep problems
• Mood changes (e.g., irritability, symptoms of depression or anxiety)
• Osteoporosis

Your dropping estrogen levels are directly to blame for many of these symptoms. Less estrogen affects your vaginal tissue, affecting lubrication and elasticity, while contributing to bone density loss. 

Balancing your estrogen levels

If the symptoms of perimenopause sound less than ideal, you’ll be glad to know you have an alternative path forward. With bioidentical hormone therapy, Dr. Grafton and our team can introduce estrogen that’s chemically identical to what your body makes. 

As this estrogen releases in your body, it replaces what you’re no longer making as you transition through perimenopause. This eases — and may even stop — unwanted symptoms like hot flashes, sexual function changes, and low mood.  

All told, if you don’t intervene, your estrogen levels will drop through perimenopause. But bioidentical hormone therapy gives you a safe and effective way to replace what your body’s no longer naturally producing. As a result, it mitigates a broad range of the unwelcome changes that come with perimenopause and menopause. 

To learn more about what bioidentical hormone therapy could do for you, call us at PSI Medical Group in Wixom, Michigan, or book an appointment through our convenient website scheduler today.